The invention of books it changed the world. It made culture accessible, first to a very few, then to more and more people.
There was a time when books, now mass consumer goods accessible to anyone due to their modest price, could only be purchased by nobles and wealthy families, who studied and entertained themselves thanks to them. Some of the titles we present to you today date back to such remote times that they can represent this identikit.
Others are more modern, others even more recent, demonstrating the fact that writing a book always constitutes a revolutionary act, even when it seems that everything or almost everything has already been said by others.
From the “Iliad” to “Madame Bovary”, from the “Divine Comedy” to “If This Is a Man”, today we discover 10 books that changed the face of the world.
10 books that changed the world
Homer’s “Iliad”.
The “Iliad” is one of those books that many love during their school years – let’s face it, the events involving the Pelidian Achilles and the other Achaeans, together with the dynamic interweaving of divinities that take on all too human connotations, would arouse the interest of anyone -, and which is then put aside, labeled as an epic reading.
We invite you to rediscover the immeasurable value of one of the most important books of the world’s cultural heritage. One of those who really changed the world and our way of conceiving literature.
A world in which death is the dominant event is flooded with metaphysical light and fixed in the cruel image of a perfect and shadowless form.
It is the lost world of heroes, the privileged arena of champions, the aristocratic universe of princes: walled in its inexorable laws, marked by a clear and short time, burned by excess splendor.
Roberto Calasso compared it to a «huge boulder abandoned on the plain»; a boulder that weighs on the entire Greek imagination, a petrified universe that projects countless charismatic figures onto the West – Helen and Achilles, Hector and Andromache, Priam and Hecuba, Patroclus, Paris, Odysseus, Ajax, Agamemnon, Diomedes: often recalled by their poetic Valhalla to become the subject of a dissertation, anecdote, drama of legend, but ready to return to their sphere of privilege and preclusion to summarize, together with the archetypal and emblematic role, the double face of the enigma.
Nothing before the Iliad, everything after the Iliad. Reading this poem means finding secret keys, often forgotten, that open a thousand doors: all aspects of a great civilization have their deep roots here – and here only.
“The Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri
Here is a book – or rather, three books – that has changed the face of the world and the Italian language forever. Reading the “Divine Comedy” means entering a timeless parallel universe, which tells a lot about us and our past.
At the exact center of our culture lies “The Divine Comedy”. A masterpiece in three songs – Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – unanimously considered among the most extraordinary creations in the history of humanity.
Having reached the halfway point of his existence, a man is able to visit the afterlife alive: this is the simple and ingenious idea from which Dante’s fresco takes shape. His representation of heaven and earth is inspired by the characteristic ways of medieval literature and style but at the same time proves to be profoundly revolutionary.
A new and disenchanted perception of History in a story that spans the course of the centuries, testifying to a profound understanding of human reality.
“Don Quixote de la Mancha” by Miguel de Cervantes
With “Don Quixote”, Cervantes gave life to a memorable character who has remained engraved in the collective imagination of the world. With its versatility and its picaresque nature, it could not be missing among the books that changed the world.
Don Quixote is the symbol of blind faith in an ideal that resists any outrage, while his squire Sancho is the living allegory of common sense, of the even thankless concreteness of reality.
But Cervantes’ novel presents itself as a much more stratified and complex work, impossible to constrain within the limits of this unilateral stylization: it is at the same time a gallery of the literary genres of his time, from love poetry to the picaresque novel to the pastoral novel; the mirror of the controversial transition from the Renaissance ideals of harmony and measure to the inventive madness of the Baroque; but also and above all a timeless reflection on human nature and its unavoidable contradictions.
“A Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle
It changed the world because since then, the genre of mystery books in which you have to solve a case has developed into the incredible mix of suspense and entertainment that it is today.
Published in 1887, “A Study in Scarlet” is the first novel (of four) in which the character of Sherlock Holmes appears fully.
Flanked by the doctor John Watson, discharged from the army due to a wound, the English investigator stands out for his extraordinary skills in chemistry and anatomy and his incredible deductive ability, implemented starting from a few physical details or details relating to the clothing. “A Study in Scarlet” focuses on the mysterious murder of a man, found dead in a house with a woman’s wedding ring next to him and the writing “Rache” (revenge, in German) on the wall.
“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
It changed the world, indeed. Because, for once, one of the first, she demonstrated to the world that women can write books and create authentic masterpieces, even in fields that are usually labeled as purely male. But also because “Frankenstein” set a precedent, constituting the archetype of a genre in its own right.
Mary Shelley undoubtedly created a masterpiece, but also a sort of pop icon, which has become proverbial and versatile, capable of being evoked in the most unexpected situations. […] On the one hand, Frankenstein arouses interest as a hypothesis on the possibility of a mortal taking the place of God or Nature, while on the other it brings to light every feeling of horror and repulsion rooted in the deepest recesses of the human soul.
“1984” by George Orwell
With “1984”, George Orwell demonstrated that reality can be told, analyzed and criticized by writing about parallel and impossible worlds. Dystopian books owe a great deal to this unparalleled work. A must read at least once in your life.
It is 1984 and in London, “vast and ruinous, a city of a million dustbins”, order is maintained by a thought police that intervenes at the slightest situation of dissent and houses are equipped by law with television cameras.
They are tools to control the lives of citizens, and they are used by the Party, a government system at the top of which is Big Brother, a mysterious figure that no one has ever seen in person, although his images stand out on every wall to remind the inhabitants that are observed. In this scenario moves Winston Smith, a shadowy low-level Party official, employed at the Ministry of Truth with the task of rewriting history to align it with current political thought.
But his propensity for moral conduct and a certain interest in the truth will lead him down a path that, if discovered, would be considered “rebellious”.
“If This Is a Man” by Primo Levi
On the contrary, Primo Levi’s books have changed the world by telling reality, naked, raw and frightening, to testify how much darkness men are capable of but also to metabolize unspeakable weights and suffering.
Primo Levi, a veteran from Auschwitz, published “If this is a man” in 1947. Einaudi welcomed him in 1958 in the “Essays” and since then it has been continuously reprinted and translated all over the world. Shocking testimony on the hell of the concentration camps, a book of the dignity and abjection of man in the face of mass extermination, “If This Is a Man” is a literary masterpiece of an already classic measure and composure.
It is a fundamental analysis of the composition and history of the Lager, that is, of the humiliation, the offense, the degradation of man, even before his suppression in extermination.
“Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert
With his books, Flaubert helped create the skeleton of the modern novel. But it was with “Madame Bovary” that he bewitched readers and readers, scandalizing others; It is with this character so human, so detestable, so fallible, that he has earned a place in the Olympus of world writers.
“A hurricane of the skies that hits life, upsets it, tears away all resistance and sucks the entire heart into the abyss”: this is how the young Emma Rouault understands love who, nourished by romantic dreams, marries Charles Bovary, a quiet country doctor. Neither her husband’s devotion nor her motherhood calms her dissatisfaction and restlessness: her provincial life seems petty to her.
Symbol of an incurable sentimental and social frustration, Emma chases love in the arms of her lovers and goes into debt to fill the void in her soul by living beyond her husband’s means. An absolute masterpiece of the modern novel, Madame Bovary brought its author a sensational trial for moral contempt.
“Ulysses” by James Joyce
And then came Modernism, with its difficult, innovative books, which try to tell the story of the speed of unstoppable change. “Ulysses” is certainly not an easy read. But it deserves to be browsed and read at least once, because it is truly one of those books that changed the world and the way of conceiving literature.
Dublin, 16 June 1904, one of the most important days on the calendar of world literature. It is the date chosen by James Joyce to immortalize the life of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus in just under twenty-four hours, creating a work destined to revolutionize the novel.
It is the daily odyssey of modern man, the protagonist not of mythical and extraordinary wanderings, but of a normal life which however reserves – if observed closely – no fewer emotions, twists, unexpected events and adventures than the ten-year journey of the Homeric hero .
“The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire
Among the books that changed the world, the poetic collection that enraptured, enamored and shocked could not be missing; which laid the foundations for a reflection on the role of the modern poet, which introduced new themes and better defined others.
The first edition of “Flowers of Evil” (June 1857) was subjected to trial for contempt of public morality: six poems were condemned and expunged from the text. Two more editions followed, one in 1861, the other, posthumously, in 1868. Baudelaire’s book, compendium and emblem of modern poetry, arrives, with intact fragrance, in the heart of our era.
Sweet and atrocious, in his verses he welcomes the scent of angels and the sound of the metropolis, the seduction of beauty and the misery of decline, the blue of unattainable distances and the tedium of repetition. In an extraordinary range of registers and tones, it gives shape to the cry of passions and the cold of exile, to the wounds of love and the bitter knowledge of travel
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